Highly inspiring for anyone seeking solace in our modern world.
The founding pastor of St. Lydia’s dinner church in Brooklyn reflects on her eight years ministering to a progressive, diverse, and LGBTQ–affirming congregation.
In this intimate and openly heartfelt debut memoir, Scott explores the power of faith and community as strength-building resources for navigating difficult times. The author recalls her efforts in forming a unique church setting that aspired to welcome a diverse community and offer unconventional means of worship: sharing meals around a dinner table. At first, Scott tested her vision at temporary venues throughout the city, with small groups of worshippers, before landing a permanent location in the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn. Throughout the book, the author shares stories of the assorted individuals who were drawn to St. Lydia’s and their unified quest to meaningfully connect with the needs of their neighborhood, including the nearby public housing units. Pivotal experiences—e.g., Hurricane Sandy and the police shootings of unarmed black youths—motivated them toward direct social action within their community, serving to further bolster their ties as a congregation. Scott’s intimately transparent voice and reflections on faith are what drive her compelling narrative. Throughout, she references scriptural texts and offers enlightened interpretation of the individual stories. She’s equally relatable and forthright in exposing her own vulnerabilities and loneliness as a single woman living in the city along with her responsibilities and insecurities ministering to the needs of her congregants. “This is a story about how bread, broken and passed from hand to hand, rescued me from my aloneness,” she writes. “Perhaps you’ve been alone as well, and need to be reminded that, despite all evidence to the contrary, your aloneness will not last forever. When I think of what our church made together, I think of those small beacons of light reminding you that even if you haven’t found it yet, there is a shore somewhere, and you won’t drown in these depths.” Scott delivers a moving personal memoir and an accessibly reverent meditation on finding faith through unconventional acts of worship.
Highly inspiring for anyone seeking solace in our modern world.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13557-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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